Blog

MagAO’s Newest Sagan Fellow

MagAO’s Own.

We are very excited to announce that MagAO’s very own Kate Follette has been awarded a NASA Sagan Fellowship. Her proposal, “Finding and Characterizing Forming Protoplanets with Next-Generation Adaptive Optics Systems”, was one of just 6 selected this year. You’ll probably have guessed that “Next-Generation” AO systems includes our very own MagAO.

Kate’s Sagan project involves imaging baby planets with MagAO+VisAO’s H-alpha capability, and following up with the amazing Gemini Planet Imager (GPI). You can read all about Kate’s project in this pdf.
Here’s Kate on her way up to the telescopes at LCO. Way to go Kate!
Dr Follette hard at work driving VisAO.

Congratulations Kate, and welcome to the Sagan Fellows family!

MagAO at 2016 SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation

MagAO is at the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference in Edinburgh, Scotland this week. Instrumentation-astronomers from around the world are gathered here to talk science and engineering. The talks feature everything from detector technology, high-speed computing, and telescope operations to gravitational waves and extrasolar planets.

Edinburgh

My talk about MagAO was the first one of the conference:

My talk about the MagAO status update

Jared had two posters:

Jared’s Orbital-Differential Imaging (ODI) poster

This one is about MagAO-2k and MagAO-X:

Jared’s MagAO-2k and MagAO-X poster

And Enrico had one:

Enrico’s SOUL poster

Laird gave an invited talk about visible-light AO:

Laird’s invited talk about visible-light AO

And Armando about the new AO system for the VLT:

Armando talking about ERIS AO

We took the opportunity of all being in the same place to plan our MagAO upgrade to 2 kilohertz, called MagAO-2k.

The MagAO team meets to plan our next engineering run for the MagAO-2k upgrade

Some more pictures from around the conference:

Claire Max and her current and former students

Proof that Jared and Olivier are in the same room together

UA grad student Asher Baltzell gave a talk in the Cyberinfrastructure section about his work creating a cloud-computing software package to detect exoplanets in MagAO data. This work was featured in this video by Cyverse:

Finally, check out the SPIE post about the conference here. Look for me, Asher, and MagAO in there!

2016B Engineering Only

Just a quick reminder for MagAO users who may be considering submitting a telescope proposal in the near future: MagAO will not be available for general use in the 2016B semester. The system will be on the telescope during the semester, but for engineering work only. This work includes recalibration, and installation of the MagAO-2K upgrades: more modes controlled, faster speed (up to 2000 Hz), and installation and commissioning of a new detector for Clio.